An “Amber Alert” for your pets?

It’s been more than a year since my dogs escaped from my backyard after a landscaping crew accidently left the gate open. But I still have nightmares about that stressful and frightening night spent blindly running down the streets in my neighborhood frantically calling out for my dogs (who were half way to Kansas by the time I got home from work!). If only I could have turned my search into a community-wide effort instead of one-woman show, My girls could have been home sooner!

According to the American Humane Association, only 17 percent of lost dogs and 2 percent of cats make it back home. Almost 4 million pets are euthanized annually because owners can’t be reached in time. Now, there is new technology that is bringing back lost pets right away from all over the country, and it’s called FindToto. Pegged as the nation’s emergency phone alert system for missing pets, FindToto is one of the leading internet-based pet recovery systems.

Here’s how it works: When a pet goes missing, FindToto uses the address of your pet (or the last place the animal was seen) as the center of a targeted neighborhood alert. The recovery system automatically calls hundred (even thousands if you pay for it) of neighbors within an hour with a human-recorded message describing the missing furball and the quickest way to get ahold of its owner (usually by phone) and where to view the pet’s picture and information. If the phone isn’t answered, the recovery system leaves a message.

Pet owners pay a service fee each time they need to use FindToto, with packages priced based on how many neighbors need to be called. Start with 500 for $125 if you live in a town with 10,000 residents or work your way up to 5,000 phone calls for metropolitan areas with 70,000 plus residents. Packages are designed to reach about a 1 mile radius.

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I admit it: I’m also a sap for the “success stories of the day” from the company’s site, like this one about “Buddha” in Virginia. The owners said the dog had been missing for more than a week, but when a neighbor saw Buddha near his home, a quick phone call had Buddha reunited with his family in just 15 minutes!

From the many other letters on the website, it’s clear that canvassing the neighborhood with hundreds of flyers doesn’t always work. As a pet owner, I always pay attention to those flyers, and look at them whenever I see them hanging up. But it’s far too easy for passersby to ignore the flyers in the day-to-day rush. Coal the Cat’s parents wrote this in a thank you note: “(the hero) had not noticed any of the 100 flyers we had up in the area on telephone poles and at the local stores. It was definitely the call from findtoto.com that got us our beloved cat back.” Why not double or even triple your chances of finding a cat or dog by posting up flyers and using a recovery system such as Findtoto? I think $125 is a small price to pay for bringing a lost family member safely home, and I will be sure to use it should I need to in the future.

There are other options available to give a frantic pet lover that much more help. Since my dog’s foiled freedom attempt, I joined the HomeAgain service. The woman who rescued my dogs was unable to reach me, so she took them to a local shelter. When I went to pick them up, shelter staff suggested I enroll in the HomeAgain microchip service where a shelter veterinarian would inject a tiny microchip about the size of a grain of rice (12mm) beneath the surface of my dog’s skin between the shoulder blades. It is read by passing a microchip scanner over the pet’s shoulder blades. The scanner emits a low radio frequency that provides the power necessary to transmit the microchip’s unique code and positively identify the pet.

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If your pet gets lost and is taken to an animal shelter or veterinarian, they will scan the microchip to read its unique code which is a number used by HomeAgain to identify the pet and retrieve your contact information. Then owners are contacted.

The service has a national network of more than 20,000 vets and animals shelters, plus 200,00 volunteer “PetRescuers” who receive emails alerting them to pets lost in their area. I am a PetRescuer myself, although every time a pet is lost, I alway seem to be miles, even cities away from the last place it was seen. But, still, I look forward to the chance to give relief and happiness to a pet owner like my neighbor gave me when she told me she had found my dogs.

Rapid Lost Pet Alerts sends out urgent notices to veterinarians and shelters surrounding the area in which your pet was lost. It even supplies a customizable “Lost Pet” poster to print and post.

Next, I think I will register with the Amber Alert for Pets system, another internet recovery system based here in Colorado. For a lifetime membership fee, Amber Alert contacts members via the web to keep a watch out for the missing pet. Members sign a pledge to actually get outside and help look for lost pets and post flyers.

Every so often, I catch myself gazing at my dogs, wondering what my life would have been like had they not been found and returned. With more programs like this being developed, and a little luck, hopefully I will never have to find out.